The EU’s Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News

All this month, the European Union’s “trilogue” is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and voted through.

One of these proposals is Article 11, the “link tax,” which requires a negotiated, paid license for links that contain “excerpts” of news stories. The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a “link” or a “news story” and implies that an “excerpt” consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).

Article 11 is so badly drafted that it’s hard to figure out what it bans and what it permits (that’s why we’ve written to the trilogue negotiators to ask them to clarify key points). What can be discerned is deeply troubling.